September 2020 Archives
A New Dawn for 3D Ground Penetrating Radar Arrays
I was first immersed in ground penetrating radar (GPR) as a PhD student at Lulea University in northern Sweden in the mid-1990s, and I immediately fell in love with the technology. I love the ability it gives me to see hidden things so quickly and elegantly. I also love the notion that the equipment is […]
The Early Days of 3D Scanning, Part 4: Chevron, Cyra and Trimble
Thus far in my “insider story” (June, July, August 2020), I’ve described how, while working for Trimble in 1996, I first became aware of the technology, which was then still in development. After a jaw-dropping demo, I dove deep into evaluating the technology and its pioneering start-up company, Cyra Technologies, for a possible partnership with […]
Geospatial Adventure: Mapping Ruins from Above in Peru
It wasn’t quite an Indiana Jones adventure, but Alabama-based lidar consultant Robert Graham says it’s as close as he’ll ever come to the hair-raising exploits of an audacious archaeology professor. Graham’s adventure last April did not revolve around an ark, though it did include ancient ruins, small planes landing in grass fields, machetes hacking through […]
Doers: James Cooper
Leaving school at 15 years old with little education wasn’t unusual in the UK before it was compulsory to complete your education and take exams. That’s the path James Cooper found himself on in 1972, but he made the best of it. Suffering from both dyscalculia and dysgraphia, he found school a challenge. This is […]
Seeing the Light: Laser Accuracy with LightXY
On a construction site, cement and concrete finishers, carpenters, framers, electricians, plumbers, flooring installers, and other trades people spend a lot of time taking measurements and interpreting blueprints before they can even start any of the specialized tasks they are trained and paid to perform. Until recently, it was not possible to project the blueprints […]
Safety First: Using Small Drones to Map Unsafe Sites
Traditionally, photogrammetry based on aerial images and stereo plotting, has been the realm of large mapping companies capable of affording the onerous ownership of planes and the high personnel cost of pilots, navigators and camera operators. The equipment used to convert the stereoscopic pairs into contour line maps cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and […]